Kate Hext is a lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. She has written widely on aestheticism and the relationship between literature and philosophy in the nineteenth century.

• Acknowledgements; Note on Editions and Abbreviations; 1. Introduction: Individualism and the 'aesthetic philosopher'; 2. Empiricism and the Imperilled Self; 3. Subjectivity and Imagination: from Hume to Kant via Berkeley; 4. Metaphysics: Pater's Failed Attempt at Atheism; 5. Sense and Sensuality: Caught between Venus and Dionysus; 6. Pater's Copernican Revolution: the Desiring, Dying Body; 7. Evolution and the "species": The Individual in Deep Time; 8. The Moment and the Aesthetic Imagination; 9. Ethics, Society and the Aesthetic Individual; 10. Conclusion: 'the elusive inscrutable mistakable self’; Bibliography.

In this original study of Walter Pater’s many contexts - Oxford’s classicists and colleges, late Victorian ideologies, German Idealism, theories of evolution and time - Kate Hext’s Pater is revealed as intensely modern, obsessed with the most modern of problems: the status of the individual in nature and society. If the Blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, the individual Pater and Pater’s Individual are blessed in Hext’s graceful, philosophical touch.